[geeks] Intel Mac Mini - Horrible USB2 drive performance

[William Kirkland]

Have you tested each drive independently from the other? That is, have
you measured the performance of copying a file from one usb to local
disk, then from the local disk to the other usb connected disk? if so,
what sort of results did you get?

What about other usb connected devices? can you remove all but the  
disk(s) in question? (I believe you should keep your keyboard and  
mouse ...) remove network connections as well?



On May 24, 2007, at 11:12 PDT, geeks-request at sunhelp.org wrote:

Message: 7
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 13:25:09 -0400
From: <geeks at litfire.com>
Subject: Re: [geeks] Intel Mac Mini - Horrible USB2 drive performance
To: "'The Geeks List'" <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Message-ID: <00f101c79e28$8794b9e0$10f53c05 at core>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Bill Bradford said:
> Are you running them through a USB1.1 hub, perhaps?  I have no  
> problems
> with USB2.0-attached disks on any of my Macs (PPC or CoreDuo).

Well, thanks for the confirmation that it's not the platform as a whole.

I've got the drives directly plugged into the Mini.  Cables that came  
with
the drives.  System Profiler says "up to 480MB/sec", so I'm assuming  
that it
knows it's USB 2.0.

No indication of problems in the system.log, and while I could see the
chipset being a possible issue (the Cavalry uses a JMicron bridge),  
but I
guess my best path is probably to take the issue up with Western  
Digital,
since I think that Apple will point first to the drives, and Cavalry is
cheap crap with an Engrish website.

And for those who replied back about the superiority of Firewire... if I
were really performance conscious, I wouldn't have gotten a Mac Mini.  I
don't need or expect high performance.  I, however, expect that I  
should be
able to stream a 2500kb/sec mp4 to my aTV, or at least have the  
bottleneck
be the wireless link and not the drive.

-Anthony

--
bill.kirkland at gmail.com